Tony Blackburn, still on air at 71, on his 'unique intimacy’ with listeners,
his fury at Jimmy Savile, and why he’s no longer a worrier

Tony Blackburn (yes, that Tony Blackburn) is dancing for my pleasure. I haven’t asked him to, but compact and dapper in a natty brown corduroy jacket and pink shirt, he is performing unbidden. As he deftly executes “ the scissors”, jazz hands to attention, his familiar gnome face – cheery grin, sad eyes – beaming from ear to ear, I find myself shrieking with mildly hysterical laughter. It’s funny. It’s fabulous. It’s without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most surreal moments of my life.

“I’m having a procedure to sort out my sciatica next week, and after that I’ll be ready when Strictly calls.” He’s joking, I think. But the thing is, with Tony Blackburn it’s difficult to tell.

“What a lot of people don’t realise is that I don’t take myself seriously,” he says, seriously. “In the old days I used to go on stage in front of huge crowds and stand there, saying “I’m letting you admire me,” but there were always people who groaned because they didn’t realise it was a joke.”

I strongly suspect they knew perfectly well it was a joke, just not a good one. I don’t say so, however, because not only would that be a bit mean, but Blackburn, 71, is on tremendous form, having just been told that he is the recipient of the Radio Academy’s lifetime achievement gold award, for 50 years in broadcasting. Unusually, this is his second such award; first time round he was given it as a mere stripling of 46, with only 25 years on the proverbial clock.

That he is still on air – on an assortment of BBC and commercial shows – six days a week is testament to his talent and his adaptability. When he appeared on the first ever I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, he aced it. After gamely taking on the role of peacemaker – “I was the Henry Kissinger of the jungle” – he actually went and won the dang thing.

“The funny thing was I’d gone into the jungle to news stories that I was trying to rescue my career, but my career was fine,” he says. “I might not have been on national radio every day, but I was doing what I love most, and I still am.”

There may be something hubristically Alan Partridge about the parabola of Blackburn’s career, which began on the pirate station Radio Caroline, ascended to the giddy heights of the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, and now finds him driving about to regional stations and occasionally appearing on the shopping channel QVC. “I sold more Billy the Bass singing fish than anyone else,” he says proudly.

But Blackburn’s passion for broadcasting runs so deep that his pleasure is undiminished whether it’s his soul show on Radio London, interviews and chat on BBC Berkshire, playing Eighties and Nineties tracks on KMFM in Kent or Pick of the Pops on Radio 2 on Saturday afternoons.

“For me, it’s always been about the music,” he says. “I love soul, that’s where my heart lies, but there are still great songs being written and great artists performing them. I love Beyoncé and Jesse J and Alicia Keyes… the joy of music is that there’s always something –someone – new emerging.”

Blackburn’s heyday was in the Sixties and Seventies, when he would pitch up for personal appearances and be mobbed. In Scotland, they literally tore the jacket from his back. In England, the crowd surged so far forward that the front row smashed through the glass frontage of a supermarket he was supposed to be declaring open.

“It was all a bit mad, but great fun,” he says. “The DJs were built up to be stars in our own right, and as a result we were as famous as the artists we played.”

Yet for all the adulation, there was a wicked accuracy to the Harry Enfield satire of DJs Smashey and Nicey; permatanned, shiny-blousoned, churning out self-satisfied banalities to a soundtrack of Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

Smashey was modelled on Blackburn at his cheesiest, who gamely insists he found it flattering.

“What tends to get forgotten were the restrictions on what we could say,” he interjects, keen to put the record straight. “My job was to entertain and tell corny jokes, not have opinions or talk politics. If I wanted to wish the Queen a happy birthday, I had to get clearance from above.”

In 1972, Blackburn married the Robin’s Nest actress Tessa Wyatt, and they had a son, Simon, now 41. She left him four years later, after he had an affair, which was all rather sad.But arguably the real tragedy was the way he weepily poured his heart out to his 20 million-plus listeners. Having tuned in to the Radio 1 Breakfast Show for a rib-tickle-tabulous morning pick-me-up, they found themselves greeted with mawkish lachrymosity and endless songs about heartbreak. Weirdly, no one – not the producer, not the top brass, not the listeners – told him to shut up.

“If someone had just said, 'You’re boring everybody, stop it,’ I would have, immediately,” he says. “But at the time, I was feeling –”

Loopy? I offer. Apparently not; Blackburn shakes his head.

“Relaxed. Yes, that’s the word. Mostly because I was on Valium,” he adds chirpily. “But there’s also a unique intimacy about radio that made me feel as though I was confiding in friends. It was stupid, really.”

Was there also a non-interventionist policy when it came to the behaviour of other DJs? I wonder aloud. I mean, of course Jimmy Savile, Top of the Pops stalwart and serial abuser, whose appalling crimes have cast a pall over the BBC and led to sweeping police investigations. Dave Lee Travis, who was cleared of 12 counts of indecent assault in February, is facing a retrial on two outstanding charges. Rolf Harris, accused of a string of sex attacks, has been remanded on bail (they both deny the charges).

At the mention of Savile’s name, Blackburn’s pale blue eyes glitter with icy fury. “He was never a part of the Radio 1 team,” he says, emphatically. “He recorded his Savile’s Travels show and sent it in and I only ever saw him when we presented Top of the Pops together; I didn’t like him as a broadcaster, and as a person he just trotted out the same “Now then, Now then,” catchphrases off air as well as on. Nobody really knew him.

“I heard rumours, but I never saw anything untoward happen. And his unforgiveable behaviour has now tainted that whole era, which was actually pretty wonderful, and it’s a disgrace he’s not here to face the consequences of the terrible things he did.”

Blackburn, who married his second wife, Debbie, a theatrical agent in 1992, and with whom he has a 17-year-old daughter, Victoria, wrote extensively about the glory days in his autobiography Poptastic! My Life in Radio.

“The opportunities to let this [fame] go to your head were manifold,” he wrote. “There was an endless stream of record pluggers eager to wine and dine you, invitations galore, flattery from all sides – and a generous supply of women ready to throw themselves at you.”

They were racy times: he lived with a bunny girl for two years and when she moved on, she left no note, just her bunny ears and white pom-pom tail on the pillow of the bed they had shared.

He is a little more circumspect these days, however, observing that his was adult, consensual fun. But since his marriage to Debbie, he’s been a one-woman man.

Blackburn was born in Surrey and brought up in Bournemouth; his mother was a nurse and his father a GP. His younger sibling, Jacqueline, has been confined to a wheelchair since childhood due to polio. He phones her every day.

“I always assumed she’d come and live with me and Debbie, but she has such a great social life in Poole, where she lives, she has no intention of moving anywhere,” he says. “I admire her so much; she’s had a tough life, but she never complains.”

After attending Millfield School in Somerset, where he captained the cricket team, Blackburn read business studies at Bournemouth college and sang in a dance band. Then he spotted an advert in the NME for DJs for what was to be the pirate station Radio Caroline, and on July 25 1964, his broadcasting career was launched on a three-masted cargo schooner, Mi Amigo, anchored three-and-a-half miles off the Essex coast.

Those early days were immortalised in the Richard Curtis film The Boat that Rocked, but Blackburn wasn’t impressed with the depiction of drinking and parties. “If it was as good as he made it out to be, we’d all still be there now,” he says, with a hint of tetchiness. “You can’t get drunk in a North Sea swell, and women were definitely not allowed on board.”

After two years, he continued his career on terra firma at Radio London, another ground-breaking venture which subsequently provided the blueprint for all commercial stations, with its combination of music, chat and jingles.

Then, in 1967, Blackburn joined the Establishment. Indeed, his was the first voice on Radio 1, when he introduced The Move’s Flowers in the Rain. But he no longer listens to it on the grounds that “Radio 1 isn’t supposed to appeal to 71-year-olds”; he now prefers speech radio or Radio 2.

An avowed technophile, he was an early adopter of social media and is a regular Tweeter, memorably during the Brit Awards, when he complained about the Arctic Monkeys posturing as bad boys rather than graciously accepting their award. “They’ll learn,” he says philosophically. “Everyone has to grow up at some stage.”

But growing up doesn’t have to mean growing old, and there is something preternaturally youthful about Blackburn, who radiates contentment; both with what he does and who he is.

“I used to be a real pessimist, a terrible worrier,” he admits, which would account for the sad eyes. “But now, I’ve reached a point where I can stand up and say I like myself and I like personality-driven broadcasting, not 20 records in a row and then a time check. That’s not proper radio, that’s a machine.”

And not even the most popmungous machine can dance the scissors.

Tony Blackburn will be honoured with the Gold Award at the 32nd Radio Academy Awards on Monday May 12 in London www.radioacademy.org